From: CHAS membership <membership**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG>
Subject: [DCHAS-L] Follow up to yesterday's post: Ep.82 Why do we audit so much?
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2021 09:46:55 -0400
Reply-To: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU>
Message-ID: 0643A644-3A13-4E01-94B7-BDF667253C16**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org


I was interested to hear in this week‰??s Safety of Work podcast Ep.82 Why do we audit so much?
at https://safetyofwork.com/episodes/ep82-why-do-we-audit-so-much
a discussion that paralleled the editorial I highlighted yesterday. The podcast directly relates to safety aspects of this issue. The summary is:

It's Modelling the Micro-Foundations of the Audit Society: Organizations and the Logic of the Audit Trail by Michael Power.
This paper gets us thinking about why organizations do audits in the first place seeing as it has been proven to often decrease the efficiency of the actual process being audited. We discuss the negatives as well as the positives of audits - which both help explain why audits continue to be such a big part of safety management in organizations.

However, the more academic of the two hosts goes out of his way to talk about how the citation indexing process is a form of auditing of research work that redirects effort away from effective work to countable work. The podcast goes on to explore how this impacts safety programs, particularly in directing their focus to lost time incidence rates rather than safety improvements in the work place.

The podcast as a whole is worth a listen if you get the chance.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
Membership Chair
American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Health and Safety
membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org

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